Abi Jones

Abi Jones is a designer and sprint master at Google. She helps teams answer critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Abi specializes in storyboarding and in 2015 she illustrated the 2nd edition of Understanding Your Users.

Author of:

with

Wed

25

14:00 - 17:30

Auditorium III

Workshop

Explore, Persuade, Destroy

Storyboarding for product development

Storyboarding converts the brainstorming whirlwind of notes into a real product direction, and in turn provides a vision that your team can return to throughout the design and development process. In this workshop you’ll how to put your ideas in the context of user needs through storyboarding.

Exploring product ideas with stories bridges silos between your teams and gets you communicating by using collaborative methods to define product direction. By crafting a story together, every member of your team is focused on building a single, cohesive product.

Persuade your managers and clients to champion user-centered products by channeling the power of stories. From childhood we’re wired to remember and think in story structure. In this workshop you’ll get examples of how to harness this ingrained skill by presenting your product concepts in the form of stories and storyboards.

Destroy zombie ideas, the ones without a brain or beating heart. Zombies eat resources and sap your team’s time, energy, and commitment. Your storyboards will drive a product’s structure and flow, saving time by focusing on living, breathing ideas that provide value to your users.

You’ll learn:

How to structure a story as a test for product needs

Why successful storyboards rely on in-person presentation

How to get and give feedback on your product stories

Change your team’s focus from features to use goals

Who should attend

This workshop is useful for people who participate in the decision-making process about a product, including designers, developers, product managers, and business owners. This workshop is designed for people of all levels of experience.

Thu

26

10:20 - 10:55

Auditorium I

Talk

How We Talk and How Machines Listen

The Structure of Discourse in Human-Computer Interaction

Abi Jones compares human-to-human and human-computer conversation and interaction, introducing you to the conversational machines in your life and those to come. Learn what makes for great human-computer speech interaction from the first turn to the last, how computers interpret speech, and why it’s more enjoyable and addictive to talk to a 1960s chatbot than most intelligent assistants available today.